Mysteries of Isis 9 – the Hearth-Fire and the Sea

Posted on June 29, 2015 by janeadamsart

Mother Isis of the Moon, 2015

In esoteric work for the healing of nations, there are at least two main streams – the path of the Lineages and the path of the Hearth-fire. Through occult Lineage traditions, an octave of initiations is handed down to practitioners. This way of discipline and group work enjoys a living contact with the Inner Plane guides and their wisdom.

Dion Fortune in 1927

In the 1920s, Dion Fortune founded a Society of the Inner Light in Avalon, Glastonbury. She became its trance medium (based on her training in psychoanalysis). She also wrote novels and books on the theory of The Mystic Qabalah, and did astral-plane police work.

Among core themes in her work, was regeneration of the natural spiritual and physical energy between men and women, which had become atrophied. (“Dion Fortune and the Inner Light” – a biography by Gareth Knight)

Mudras – builders of Avalon 2003

Dion Fortune taught also the path of the Hearth-Fire. Reaching back to the Corn goddess and the human network in Gaia, mother Earth, the Hearth-Fire complements the path of the Lineages by bringing the divine essence into our daily life and practice – our relationships, our workplace, and the way we learn our parenting.

We may visualise – as if from an aeroplane at night – a pattern of sacred fires placed here and there on earth, where the Companions of the Light are gathered and keep watch. We may approach and join them. It is said that they are most numerous over the middle east where the need for them is acute. They are gathered there in the darkness, the way antibodies travel to a wound. We need to gain a high altitude vision, to realise that because the issues show as yet no signs of resolution, that does not mean they never will.

We need to dive within. For some of us, our job is to assist the Companions by facing our own shadow projections at home – as we journey in the soul law to the source – through Self-enquiry in psychology, philosophy, family life and feelings. Time in the lap of the gods is not as our time; it all must come up and out, becoming conscious. Healing is the whole.

Here – shortened to just the main images for meditation – is Dion Fortune’s invocation of Isis as she appeared to Wilfred and Molly at the end of “The Sea Priestess” (published by Society of the Inner Light):

hearth fire, salamanders

“Night by night, as the wood smoke rose from the Fire of Azrael, we built up the form of the Priest of the Moon in the drifting shadows till he was as real to us as we were to each other; and though we knew his form was such stuff as dreams are made of, there came through that form, the touch of mind on mind, and that was the thing that counted … and so we felt the touch of mind on mind where no man was, and heard the words where no one spoke, for the thing came across the gulf on the wings of fantasy; for fantasy is the ass that carries the ark, as they said in the ancient Mysteries.

“Now it is a very odd thing, that I, who could visualise the Priest of the Moon at will till he seemed to stand out like an image in a stereoscope, always felt him to be a shadow thrown by some other reality; whereas Molly who couldn’t visualise him at all, was perfectly sure of his presence and actuality, and seemed to commune with him interiorly with as much certainty as if he were on the telephone. He taught me and I learnt all manner of things from him about Atlantis and the ancient ways of Britain. But he didn’t so much teach Molly as change her.

“… There was a sea fog that night that wrapped all round the narrow neck of land where stood the farm between the salt marsh and the tide water … only the sea remained open to us as an occasional shift of the drift of the wind opened long sea-lanes in the fog down which the moon shone, for she was low and near her setting.

“It was strange to see a sea-lane open thus, with the water all silver in the moonlight and the fog standing up in walls on either hand, like the cliffs of a phantom fiord. It was such a sea path as this down which the oldest gods might travel, coming from the moon and that which is behind the moon – most ancient time and space when earth and moon were both etheric, not yet solidified into dense matter and not yet parted from one another.

“The tide was coming in. I had begun to notice that with the rising tide Molly always seemed to wake up, unlike Morgan who came to her power when the tide was at uttermost ebb. But then she was a sea-priestess, and Molly was a priestess of corn and hearth and garth, which is another aspect of the Great Goddess whom they both served after their different ways.

priestess of black isis, priest of the moon and baal shem tav 2002

“… Presently the first shallow, spreading wash of a breaking wave ran up to the edge of the weed, and Molly put a match to her Fire of Azrael and we watched it take the flame, the dry and resinous woods rapidly turning into a pyramid of fire after their year long storage out at the fort. The seaweed burned too, with an odd iodine smell that seemed to have the ancient essence of all sea-beaches embalmed in it, and I thought of the far-travelled mariners with their gold ear-rings and curled beards, who had drawn their highbrowed sea-ships up on Ishtar’s Beere.

“Then the cold drifting-draught that is in every fog opened a sea-lane that led right out to the moon, and we saw the slow heave of the sea running all black and shadowy as the tide made up-channel. But even as we watched, the sea felt the call of the moon, and the water became flickering silver as the turn of the tide broke the rhythm of the waves, and we watched the water that had come far up the land turn again to the great deep. The waves had respected Molly’s fire, and just lipped it and made it hiss before they turned again, sinking slowly back, leaving a belt of wet sand and fresh weed to mark their path.

“Molly raised her arms in the sign of the horns of the moon, and invoked the Great Goddess as I had seen Morgan do. The moon was low in the west towards her setting, and at Molly’s feet was the red-lit Fire of Azrael, and beyond it the silver pathway stretched out over the sea toward lost Atlantis. And it seemed to me that at her call came the gods of the past and their priests and worshippers, for she was waking the old worship once again.

… The moon sank lower; the sea cut her disk and the mist of the sea banked about her in a golden nimbus. Then Something seemed to formulate in the darkness and come over the sea towards us through the mist, moving by the pathway of silver light upon the water; and it was vast, so that Its head met the stars, and It was all veiled and swathed and shrouded. Only we saw the silver Feet upon the sea, and they were like moonlight over water.

“And so She came, She of the Sea, to the place where sea meets land, and we awaited Her coming. She paused at the edge of the line of the breaking foam, Her feet and Her head among the stars, star-crowned. There was no Face to see for She is forever veiled, but there came to us the great exalted awe which some say is the gods and none other.

“This tingling fear took me by the heart and by the throat and by the eyes, gripping like a hand. And my hands began to burn and tingle with a pulsating force, and from behind my eyes it seemed to come out like a beam. And I broke out in that heavy sweat of the heat of the gods, which Morgan had told me always heralds their passing; and my breath was taken short, but not with the asthma, and I grew rigid and shook like a man in a fever fit. I looked towards Molly, and saw that she stood on tiptoe, reaching up towards her Goddess as if floating between earth and air like a frozen figure of dance, immobile, tense and effortless.

“Then slowly Great Isis turned, and drew Her veil closer about Her, and She went down the long sea-lane out towards the west, the fog closing in behind Her.

“The sea drew back with the falling tide and bared the place of Her passing, and on the sand we saw silvery pools that might have been the marks of eddies, but that we knew were Her footprints. And so She passed away as silently as She had come, but the place where She passed was holy, being filled with power. Something had touched our souls to awe, and we chose to call it the passing of the Goddess.”

Harbour, 1987

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

This blog is a vehicle to promote also my published work – The Sacred India Tarot (with Rohit Arya, Yogi Impressions Books) and The Dreamer in the Dream – a collection of short stories (0 Books). Watch this space.

aquariel link

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2014. May not be used for commercial purposes. May be used and shared for non-commercial means with credit to Jane Adams and a link to the web address https://janeadamsart.wordpress.com/

Mysteries of Isis, part 8 – the Wholeness of Osiris

Posted on June 19, 2015 by janeadamsart

This post continues the previous ones about Isis – to remind myself Who she is. The next post will conclude this series with Dion Fortune’s invocation of Isis as “the Sea Priestess”.

To label an aggressive militant virus loosely as “isis” is a misnomer, unconsciously perverting and undermining our human-ness and capacity to heal. The women and girls are attacked, stoned, tortured or infected in that mindset, which mindlessly destroys ancient sacred places.

Our genetic vitality as men and women, stems from the archetypal wisdoms and mythologies of the ancient world. Isis is – at our thoughtless peril – trampled, forgotten or abused. In the mirror of every culture, she is what we truly are, the light and the shadow. As the goddess of the Moon she rules the tides of our psychology; as Gaia she is our Earth.

What can we do?

Recognise the daily corporate hypnosis under which we lie, under which we dream as slaves, accepting belief – and wake up. It is better to see and be aware of the venom than to step right into it. The problem is not in other lands, politics or ideologies – it starts HERE, with what we care about.

Remember who we are. Find and grow from our roots, and be an example to our children. Let it spread. No frozen society out there can do it. I and you are in HERE – the open reality we create. Individual awakenings send ripples far and wide, and change things.

Here is another chapter from my “Arcanum Two” (1991, 2011):

The sea near Tintagel

September 1991 – The Wholeness of Osiris: Precession of the Equinox:
What are the scattered pieces, the fragments of Osiris? Typhon, the god of titanic entropy or disorder, slew and scattered fourteen parts of Osiris the Law-giver up and down the black land. Isis wept over, gathered and conceived from them the child HORUS, of herself and her womb-brother Osiris.

Plutarch – an initiate – tells of Horus’s battle with Typhon to avenge his father:
“We are … told that among the great numbers who were continually deserting from Typho’s party was his concubine Thueris. A serpent pursuing her as she was coming over to Horus, was slain by her soldiers. The memory of this action, they say, is still preserved in the cord which is thrown into the midst of their assemblies and then chopped into pieces.

“Afterwards it came to a battle between them which lasted many days. But victory at length inclined to Horus, Typhon himself being taken prisoner. Isis however, to whose custody Typhon was committed, was so far from putting him to death that she even loosed his bonds and set him free. This action of his mother so extremely incensed Horus that he laid hands upon her and pulled off the ensign of royalty which she wore on her head. Thoth(Hermes/mercurial) clapped onto Isis instead a helmet made in the shape of an ox’s head.

“After this, Typhon publicly accused Horus of bastardy. But with the help of Thoth the legitimacy of Horus was fully established by the judgement of the gods themselves. After this there were two other battles fought between them, in both of which Typhon had the worst. Furthermore, Isis is said to have kept company with Osiris after his death, and in consequence to have brought forth Harpocrates, who came into the world before his time and lame in his lower limbs.”

In Plutarch’s account Horus was conceived before the fragmentation; he was conceived indeed in the mutual affection of Osiris and Isis as siblings in the womb of their mother before they were born. And Horus became known to the Greeks as Apollo, the god or radiance of the Sun’s (physical) chariot.

What are those scattered fragments of Osiris?

When they are put back together he is brought to life.

Note this: he is brought to life, a life beyond the concept of beginning or ending with the fragments. Instantly it springs to being, and has always been. It crosses the plane of fragmentary knowledge.

The fragments are perhaps the multiple and illusory costumes, lifetimes, of the body. The fragments are what remains of the Alexandrian Library – the wisdom of the ancient world. They arise among the disappearance of Self-knowledge into ignorance, into the pockets of spacetime called maya, or matter or “separate” incarnations.

The initiate, entering the cave of “sleep” emerges as a bird from a tiny opening deep in the heart lotus. The pocket of space and time falls away. The chamber of all the worlds – the whole of the Great Pyramid – is open to his flight of seeing. He awakens from the trap of time.

The wholeness of OSIRIS is a dimension of which the visible shapes of his body or any of his parts are only sections in time and space across it, apparently disparate.

The reality of OSIRIS is a Great Circle; like a “lunar” or “solar” orbit of human cycles of life on earth towards Reintegration. It abides beyond and within the visible spheres. The visible bodies in the night are only allegories. Osiris and Isis are a Mystery Play of reflected light whose phases, on the Moon, seek unity. I wonder if this relates to the Great Circle (25,800 years) or precession of the equinox around the ages of history … his story?

The combined action of solar and lunar gravity causes the polar axis of earth to ‘wobble’ or describe a slow dance around itself. This exposes the terrestrial magnetic field to subtle changes in alignment with the constellations. The turning of a mystic dervish expresses this.

The rhythmic cycles of our local perception or Universe, the times for plants to grow and for human beings to awaken dormant strata to the light, seem to be governed by Osiris and his sister Isis from a plane transcending that of the zodiac (the planetary/psychological frame of reference.) Neither of them represents solely the Sun (gold) or the Moon (silver). Their mystery dance describes their cyclic relationship. Osiris, known as the Sun of the Dead, appears as the Sun’s light upon phases (death and resurrection) of the Moon, particularly as it waxes. But he derives from ‘RA’ or ‘PTAH’ of a primordial LIGHT.

The rhythmic breath of Osiris and Isis governs the solar System as a whole. Perhaps they are analogous to the galaxy or, more locally, to the nodes of intersecting planetary orbits, the petals of the Great rose. They dwell outside the measure of planetary time, while remaining inside cosmos, the Divine Circle inscribed by Thoth within atoms and stars. The name of their son HORUS means ‘Time’ and also the eye of the eagle. The higher the eagle flies the smaller appears the space-time context, and the larger is the view around it.

From the raised apex of the Pyramid which is its centre, an edifice can be viewed. The plane of the base has four sides; at the point ‘above’, where they meet, they are simultaneous. This raised point is simultaneously the length, breadth and depth of the world around. It is the stance of rectitude, of truth. The fourth dimension cancels opinion and division, because as there is no separation between things, there are no ‘things’ themselves.

The Eye of RA, the primordial SUN, is this hieroglyph for the eagle HORUS, the Oudja: “The Right Eye of the Supreme Being is the Sun, and his Left Eye is the Moon.”

In the old stories the left eye of Horus, wounded by Typnon/Seth is repaired by Thoth. Thoth, Master of writing, of sciences and of time, has again and again to separate the two combatents, gather together the fragments of the hurt Eye and heal them into a unity greater than the sum of their parts.

The Emerald Tablet of Hermes states:
“Thou shalt separate earth from fire, the subtle from the gross,
with prudence, understanding and modesty.
The Great Action rises up from the earth to the heavens
and returns again to the earth,
taking into itself the power of the Above and the Below.
Thus you will obtain the glory of the Whole world.

In the organism of the whole, the left eye has all the adventures for it receives, it is YIN; and the right eye performs the synthesis for it gives, it is YANG. Healers know intuitively that the ‘energy’ which cures fractions of the body and soul in mass, utilizes a ‘higher power’ of light beyond the small area of their differences. Isis and Osiris are a profound and esoteric resonance of the solar and lunar pulse in nature; their mutually embracing TAO.

The Great Circle and the Egg
In working with ISIS, the priestess of the Second arcanum, I feel like a ‘broken’ circle, which desires completion into a circuit. Electrically the current propels this urge over a vaccuum to return to itself. The divine Circle fell from the edgeless sphere into the elliptical distortion of a mental universe which oscillates between two poles.

This happens when the conjecturing mind pushes harder and harder at its own frontier. It constructs hypotheses, wanting everything to “fit” and falls exhausted and dead into flat paper. “So What?” What is the good of writing symphonies about silence, if there is no silence here, if waves of irritation immediately arise when the telephone doesn’t work, when the water mains is turned off, when gadgets are all-important, when fatigue snaps?

The orbital rhythms of the planets are egg shaped. Within them shines the perfect golden sphere of their birth, our yearning for them to be simply that. They move around the Sun, carrying interior Suns. Every feature of the visible universe is a dance of assymetry towards that unchanging ideal. Within my door of perception, this moves and changes and becomes the creation of matter and time. Re-cognition of ‘TWO’ catalyzes a movement towards ‘ONE’ which is ‘THREE’. The flow of current, its friction into photons or ‘particle-waves’ of light, sets up the paradox of ‘movement’ with ‘not-movement’; a relativity.

In these explorations, I am driven by beauty. The aesthetic sense has its own limitations, because it wants to make things conform to it. The mind builds castles, and becomes over taxed. The truth, being beauty, has no expectation. It is better to keep quiet, and to trust that truth is beauty, and needs no grandiose support or justification. In the absence of these, I become still.

When recognised, the testament to human beauty – a Bach cello suite, a Botticelli angel, the wind, the sea, the birds, the high pre-Cambrian moorland of mid Wales, and the colours of earth, water and autumn leaves – awakens again in its natural element. With a scented rose in the garden, who needs to construct one in the firmament, out of sight? And yet … those ones, those mansions in the subconscious, are special cultivations, seeds of wisdom. They bloom there undying … the garden for everyman to find.

Letter Gimel – wheatsheaf

The letters BEIT and GIMEL echo but are not quite the same as the Firmament which is silence.

* *

Gimel – and Into the Street
Going out now, late evening, into the street for groceries, I find – though very tired – an intense awareness of the field of space between me and each other person I see along the crowded pavement outside Waitrose. The world is differentiated. My eyesight retreats to within my spine. between the wings, and shows to me each person, each object, with clarity and without comment. Even the existence of my uppity ego has clarity, without comment.

If I hope to travel into being ‘Not Two’, it makes good sense to know what the condition of ‘Two’ really is. How can this be done without becoming lovingly interested in it? How much of life is spent bundling along and totally unaware even of duality and separate objects and the space between us? Those separate beings, mobile screens of history and inner-life, are comets who trail their births behind them, the invisible tale growing endlessly longer. They register within me with a sensation now of … something like hard diamonds. Each one is this hard and shiny rock of light… like being a jeweller. Who cut the first diamond?

Who cast the first stone?

“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone at her,” said Jesus scribbling vaguely on the ground when the elders all crowded indignantly round the repentant prostitute and asked what to do.

When I am out in the street like this, words, poems, riddles, fragments of koans come, to be stopped and written down. They are traces, incomplete, of little fish sliding away, they are mischievous mercurial promptings, of the mind that will not rest. They are like the voice which delivers an enigma between waking and sleep. It sounds like a perfect capsule for unremembered truth.

I did much free-wheeling with these promptings, for years encouraging and writing them down. They lead to my oracle, the inner ruler. But if I become too enamoured of them, they no longer guide but exhaust me – the froth and foam, but not the water of life itself.

Mental metal-fatigue is a painful exercise. What poetic fancies about Osiris and Isis can reach me here? They seem now to be only a way to pass the time, with a risk of redundancy. They seem to be effluents of arrogant cardinals in the church. What of my limited aesthetic of circles beyond the circles in the invisible sky, right now, when the birds have flown? What on earth do I know about it? They were pictures only in my mind, and now I cannot read. Creative artists are bored children.

I feel it is up to each of us as we individuate, to discover mythology and follow it upstream in a way which is unique and meaningful. The paths on a mountain are of infinite variety and relationship; they connect and lead towards the peak which dissolves them all.

It is natural to be tired, and to let Isis, the oceanic subconscious, sink back into the tide: to breathe in and out; to sleep and wake.

quantock trees

At home I read in a little book by Sundaresa Iyer:
“I am the Present ever present, so I am not newly discovered or obtained. Only I have no delusion about myself. I am unborn so death cannot affect me. For me death does not mean the loss of a body, whether gross, subtle or causal. To me death means only identifying the Self with the non-self. This is intoxication, and this intoxication is Death. So has Sri Ramana Maharshi taught.

“ … caught and drew his normal consciousness deeper and deeper inward into that in which nothing but Itself is seen or heard or known, in which there is not the shining of the sun, the moon or the stars, but which is all these and fullness Itself.

“Abidance in the Void is firmness.”

Ramana – my earliest complete sketch of him

The Mother of God
I have one more small point to investigate in the interest of these Horns of Isis. My diversions into malleable symbolic history are as satisfying as writing poetry. As follows:

Hermes Trismegistus in Virgin of the World declares that: “Over the earth and sea he reigns who nourishes all mortal creatures, the plants and fruitbearing trees and whose name is Zeus Serapis.” This is Jupiter. This deity symbolises expansion and grace. In the psychological Tree of Life, Hesed is represented by Jupiter.

Tao Tree of Life 17 3 93

I want to look briefly into the idea of the Apis bull, for I read in a scholarly book by the keeper of Egyptian antiquities at the British Museum, that the name “Serapis” is derived from Osiris-Apis. Apis is a symbol of power and fertility, associated with the god PTAH. PTAH is the expression of primaeval creative power in the cycle of Osiris. Serapis was a Ptolomeic deity who acted as a bridge from Egyptian mystery to Greek philosophy. He was a benign bearded and Jovian character, with a great interest in death and funerary ceremonial.

The qualities of primaeval power and fertility were manifest in a bull calf born with special markings in Memphis. He was kept in the Temple, venerated throughout his life as the apis bull and finally buried with royal pomp and splendour. From the earth he came, took into himself the divinity of sky and was ploughed with it, back into earth. (“The Great Action rises up from the earth to the heavens and returns again to the earth, taking into itself the power of the Above and the Below”) The pharoahs would bow to this bull as a Great King – the archetype of their virile grace and favour. “He nourishes all mortal creatures, the plants and fruit-bearing trees.” He has the forces of growth.

The holy bull must be born of a mother, the sacred cow or Mother of Apis. She was identified with Isis, as “Hathor”. The burials in due season of these bulls of God with big throats and long pointed horns, and of their mothers, are very festive occasions. When the full moon sets below the western horizon, the sun is rising in glory in the east. And after the sun himself has set, the full moon is rising high and looking for her lord.

Two horns on the head of Isis are creation’s curve, the binary of two poles which carry the current.

To Conclude:
In astrology, the moon is exalted – meaning that its power to respond is at its most benevolent and enduring – when it is travelling through the sign of “fixed earth” – TAURUS the Bull.

Tarot’s Hierophant – the High Priest, Arcanum 5 – is assigned to TAURUS, and the 6^th letter, the VAV, meaning “hook” or “that which joins”. Taurus governs the throat and ears – the faulty of inner hearing or intuition.

Like a happy assonance for a poem, is the blend of Arcanum 2’s High Priestess, whose symbol is the Moon, with the power and fertility of the bull. When the sun is in Taurus, leaves have burst their buds, the baby birds are hatched and hungry, and spring is in full flower. Those born with the moon in Taurus often have intuitive “green fingers”. There is a consistency in their sense of touch with “the plants and fruitbearing trees” in the garden by day or the tao by night. They love nature and are strong and imaginative workers in their field. They have the power of concentration.

So it is by way of thanksgiving to this exploration and enquiry with Isis, that I discover her to be beautifully earthed, and let her rest. The Taurean glyph – the circle surmounted by a crescent — gives this work its cadence.

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

aquariel link

Why does Isis have Horns?

Posted on June 19, 2015 by janeadamsart

Part 7 in the ‘Mysteries of Isis’ –
Some early writings on Isis, from my “Arcanum Two”:

25 September 1991 – The symbol for Taurus the Bull, ruled by Venus, is a circle crowned with a crescent – a pair of horns. Why the horns? To explore this question is fruitful.

How does it feel? The horns have sharp points. They are a heavy head-dress. They give majesty to the Full Moon, and define the New Moon. They are a garment of authority and they inspire fear. The horns of the Bull are antennae of the earth’s fecundity and riches. To encounter suddenly in my life a blindfold soothsayer or white witch, crowned with archaic and savage horns and sitting so still, is startling.

The horns are there to drive away or impale unwary or merely inquisitive trespassers into her subtle magnetic field. They make a repellant aura around her: a defense system. The priestess is in myself. What am I guarding? What am I protecting? Whom do I attack?

To look inward, into the well of God within atoms, is to create a surrounding “field” of space which reinterprets my material body. As “I” collapse inward – like into a black hole – this field extends outward in all directions from the singularity. It is the veil of the inner sanctuary. In all the old legends the dragon or serpent is coiled around the golden fleece. The hero must, in stepping over or neutralising the dragon, confront the storms around his own Cape Horn, and master the creative daemons that arise from his “unconscious” seeking consciousness. His chaos must transmute to kosmos — the Greek word for harmony. Only then, when the tumult dawns transformed in his being, might he behold the light of the golden fleece, by the gentle light of Isis – her moonbeam.

The hero in all these tales is the alchemist, and the adventure is trans-formation. Tentatively I suggest that the lady Isis in her pure state, together with Thrice Great Hermes who flows and makes speech with metals, is the catalyst of this transformative process. But I speak now personally …. I suppose I speak from many lifetimes. They are all only this one. For instance: I sit down each day here to write, and I do not know what it will be, and the content may flow or not as the case may be, but I am almost invariably astonished.

In the classic The Golden Ass, Lucius Apuleius gives an allegorical account of his initiation. Transformed into a donkey he had to suffer and witness the depth of human iniquity, and be beaten and abused by his inner discordancy, before the lady Isis rising from the midnight sea offered him the key to his release into human form … he must eat the rose carried by the Great Hierophant during the procession the following day, of her Mysteries. In the vision of Apuleius, as she rose from the dark sea to instruct his still asinine form:

“Her long thick hair fell in tapering ringlets on her lovely neck and was crowned with an intricate chaplet in which was woven every kind of flower. Just above her brow shone a round disk, like a mirror or like the bright face of the moon, which told me who she was. Vipers rising from the lefthand and righthand partings of her hair supported this disk, with ears of corn bristling beside them. Her many coloured robe was of finest linen; part was glistening white, part crocus-yellow, part glowing red, and along the entire hem a woven bordure of flowers and fruit clung and swayed to the breeze.

“But what caught and held my eye more than anything else was the deep black lustre of her mantle. She wore it slung across her body from the right hip to the left shoulden where it was caught in a knot resembling the boss of a shield; but part of it hung in innumerable folds, the tasselled fringe quivered. It was embroidered with glittering stars on the hem and everywhere else, and in the middle beamed a full and fiery Moon.”

Apuleius The Golden Ass

Her mantle of night is that of the visible universe, the stars and the spaces between. The snakes that support her disk, besides echoing the pair of horns, suggest the caduceus of Hermes:

Two serpents, the positive and negative polarity, entwine a staff of authority or directed power, and are held in equilibrium. The equilibrium forms the circle of her disk.

The ears of corn in Apuleius’s description, remind me of Ceres. Ceres is the ripe standing wheat of the earth, and the mother of Persephone who married the dark Underworld. “Hades”, king of the Underworld, is derived from the Greek eidein, to see.

“The centre, the depths of this sphere (of the universe) is named Hades the invisible, because the centre of a sphere cannot be seen from without. It appears visible only by means of those special forms whose images appear graven upon it, it shows itself only in effigy; but in reality it is always invisible in itself.”

Trismegistus, The Virgin of the World

Ears of corn, or wheat, are the vessels of that sprouting grain of the inner world. They are the visible allegory which is “graven upon its surface”. I, dreaming twice in the last few nights about taking earplugs out, am perhaps being advised to hear; to be here, listen and hear. For this is the way the priestess receives information … silently into the oracle or shell of her ears. The oracle, coracle, is a celtic craft on the waters. The waters dance and play with reflections from the sky in crescents of light like fallen leaves or “boats of mine a-floating … Where will all come home?”^[1]

She has her eyes closed because the instruction is to be still and hear, to be not taken in by the deception, the flickering screem of sensory sight. To hear the unruffled depth of the settling water is to be the quietness of the water itself.

I drew the ears of earth (that is Ceres) with wheat growing in them, like little masts in a walnutshell boat.

Burial and Hermetic Initiation – the Grain Sprouts
To be the awareness of the ears is to extend and receive the lateral sense of consciousness; the Capitols of the two pillars. I am what rests between them, that which is, as it is.

From that alone comes forth what is relevant to the time. Silence must receive its own information, before delivering it. Thus is truth. Open the ears, the arms, of my Soul. These horns are the ears or antennae of some creature of the deep.

The horns of Isis are the sense organ through which she receives the waves. This is her focus of divination. Between the horns is held, or hung, the equilibrated breath of her magnetic field.

* *

In the Masons’ craft, there is a ceremony of passing, from being an entered apprentice to receiving the degree of fellowcraft. This represents work on the soul, or ability to listen, in the Middle Chamber. The candidate must bear in time and maturity the fruit of his own work. So upon acceptance he is given an ear of corn.

In this gesture there is a profound mystery, which lies in the ancient body of Egypt. Isis is the dark earth or body receiving the golden grain of Osiris in the flood of the Nile river which spreads it to all parts of the black land^.^[2]^. . When the waters ebb the grain sprouts. This is the Child who is also the Father. The land of upper, middle and lower Egypt was, in ancient times the head, thorax and abdomen of the subtle body. These are parts of the embodied fragment of God which lay beneath heaven.

Like the lower arm of the letter BEIT, this fragment – like all the “fragments of hermetica” that survived the destroyed Alexandrian library – echoes but is not quite the same as the Firmament. But from within the fragment (the rock, the tomb of forgotten awareness) can be resurrected the light of Osiris. I am reminded of Thomas Browne again: We are somewhat more than ourselves in Sleep, and the Slumber of the Body seems to be but the Waking of the Soul.

It seems that in most cases the slumber or apparent death of the body, (death of the world-orientation) was a pre-requisite to resurrecting the consciousness – the Spirit – outside and encircling the spacetime continuum.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead was written to guide those who, plunged by subtle arts into profound physical sleep, awoke to behold the Holy One. The weighing of the Soul and all that followed, was not the sole prerogative of those who had reached the end of their earthly span. Some who passed through the gates or pillars of “death”, returned re-born in the light of the Sun to bear witness (and keep the secret). This idea was explored in some of Paul Brunton’s meditations in his Search in Secret Egypt.

The Sacred Books of Hermes are a collection of fragments and discourses written down in Alexandria just before or after the time of Christ. In them seems to be reflected the essential wisdom of Thoth. Thoth is the ancient secretary to the gods. He has the head of an Ibis bird, and carries his pad and pencil. The hieroglyph for AKH – Light, or the scribing of a light that pre-exists Creation – is in the form of an Ibis. The crest and plumage of this bird is dark green and shot through with glittering metallic specks of light. The root of AKH is Spirit, to shine, to irradiate. The curve of the Ibis’s neck is like the uraeus or cobra, worn by Pharaoh as his “third eye” or pineal body^*. And it is not altogether unlike the neck of a swan.

The letter BEIT is a “neck” or channel of the current of speech. Yes! Speech is Hermes. The neck through which the silvery river flows, is the lady Isis. Isis and Hermes together are Thoth, the month of the harvest, the art of the priesthood. Isis’ womb-brother Osiris is then Self knowledge within the art, for he is the Sun.

The precious stone assigned to Hermes is emerald. The Bible of spiritual alchemy “As above so below” was traditionally inscribed by him on the legendary Emerald Tablet which – says Eliphas Levi – contains all of Magic in a single page. It was found by Alexander the Great in the depths of the Great Pyramid where priests in ancient times had concealed the tomb of Hermes. In the time of the Romans the emperor Severus buried the Mysteries in Alexander’s tomb, and Diocletian destroyed all the books on alchemy. Christianity dawned upon a devastated battlefield of esoteric knowledge, a burnt-out wound of the world, a Way swept clear.

*In this light, consider the ideas of modern physicists: “Light – the range of electro magnetic frequencies – precedes the the manifestation of luminous bodies. Radiant energy is held to be the basis of all things within the range of human perception.” (P.Foster Case). The symbols and colours which picture the ancient-world mysteries are tools equivalent to the equations used in our day.

These inscriptions, burials and tombs are direct reference to language, its events and its veils. The esoteric language had to be veiled from temporal powers who would exploit or destroy it: yet perennially accessible to ‘those who knew’.

I feel the Hermetic cosmology – which has been handed down as an oral tradition, like the Kabbalah – has a Vedic antiquity. There were originally four Sacred Books of Hermes. These were subdivided into forty-two volumes, the same number as those of the Vedas which were carried from India into Egypt by the Yadava emigration (cf. Mrs Child: The Progress of Religious Ideas, 19th century). There are innumerable stories and conjectural confluences of this kind, behind the shadows we see on the wall.

But, more importantly, the Egyptian doctrine of initiation, that the Eye of God opens in the most profound “sleep” of the organic and astral body, corresponds to advaita or “Not Two” of the elder East and of Gautama. Ramana Maharshi said the SELF of God awakens in the Fourth state of consciousness – that of deepest physical “sleep” … and is always awake. The other three states of consciousness are: the physical world, dreaming, and normal sleep. All three conform to the conditioned self-world view, a horizontal play on surfaces. Awareness in the Fourth state alone is unchanging and infinite.

Awareness in the Fourth state intersects the worldview everywhere at each point vertically. The worldviews of the three other states are sections across it, and thus illusory. Our worldview has the measure (or maya) of rings of time across a living tree. The presence of the Tree itself, its root, its many branches, the birds in the foliage, and seasonal colours and sound of the wind, is invisible to the cut surface spectrum. To appreciate that a whole Tree exists NOW, above and below the surface, requires a radical leap in the inner life which till then was occupied with one ring after another of historical time.

The way is : I AM THE TREE ITSELF. I AM ROOT AND SHOOT.

In both Western and Eastern traditions, pentacles and yantras combine the flat, diagrammatic plane of sacred geometry, with the vital dimension of which it is a talisman. The solar system itself, apparently a disk of planetary orbits of time around the Sun, is a section across a living organism like a whole egg, or the petals of a rose without an outline … So it is also with the structure of the atom. Electrons around the nucleus are not things, or even points, but waves ensphering it. Sages know this intuitively, which is why they say “All is well”; for they are That. The human worldview, like music in the grooves of a flat disk, perceives what begins and ends, and must take the sage’s view on trust until the limited perception “dies”.

Nature is full of allegory: the section across the tree: concentric ripples of sound, or over water: the vessel which rises from the potters’ wheel: the spiral of seasons and orbits. The clean section across a tree is itself artificial, conforming to human tools. The faculty is specialised, and yet it still obeys the ripple form.

Awareness in the Fourth State alone unchanges. The disciple of life has no access to it through the normal senses, and so in its presence, he sleeps, he “dies”, it is night to him.

In the ancient world, the physical catalepsy, through which the divine bird flew free of the mortal frame, is a conditional form of enlightenment. Advaita teachings call it “nirvikalpa samadhi”: the bird flies free but then returns to ignorance. The Sun is hid again in the night, and becomes a memory. In unconditioned illumination, no catalepsy of the body is necessary. The sage moves easily as air with his environment. He or she is the SUN. In all their atoms, they are and know the source, as simply as the stars.

The idea is not the temporal histories and how they might all be filed together on the disk, but what the currencies of mysticism all have in common, free from time; for it is obvious that many rivers within one River flow … from the pregnant void of Source, to the ocean which is itSelf. Here again, the human view is specialised, seeking in attainment, peace.

The inner Light has no past or future. Maybe it is a musical chord of kalpas, ever present.

July 2011

The foregoing was an exploration, turning up from the subconscious field, spontaneous references to ears, hearing and speech. The title, Why Does Isis Have Horns? delivered to me, the Taurus symbol … in which the Moon (High Priestess) is exalted. This means, that when the Moon is going through Taurus, the tidal fertile function is supreme, in nature and humanity.

The Moon’s actual ruling sign is Cancer – the sensitive shoreline, the rhythm of the tides, the breath and endochrine system. When the Moon is in the Earth-sign Taurus, the tide deposits the fruits of earth on fertile ground.

Taurus’s planetary ruler is Venus – attraction, affinity, passion, the laws of gravity. With reference to hearing and speech, Taurus is assigned to the faculty of hearing, and to the throat – which I was not aware of, at the time of writing.

So sea birds follow the plough – the upturned furrows of earth – to feast.

Seagulls and plough – woodcut by Tunnicliffe

FOOTNOTES
[1] A Child’s Garden of Verses, R.L.Stevenson
[2] Ancient name for Egypt: KEMET, meaning black land – Alchemy – the Raven’s Wing

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

aquariel link

Mysteries of Isis – part 6: The Veil

Posted on June 18, 2015 by janeadamsart

Continuing with Isis, primordial matrix of humanity : touching now on the veil.

Annapurna, viewed from the Pass of 27 April

“In 1950, 3 June, they reached the summit of Annapurna and sacrificed to the goddess. He watched his gloves roll away into the abyss.”

In our stories, Eve passed the primordial knowledge to Adam. The embryo in the womb is feminine, before she sprouts the differentiation which is male or female.

the monk within the world 1987

A metaphysic is developing – men fear the way the Great Mother Ge gets her tentacles into them, and so they substituted a “squid economy“, strangling the planet.

In my previous post is a drawing of Adam and Eve: her eyes and indeed her whole face, are concealed by a rosebud: Adam (erect) looks at her.

Jacob Boehme wrote some centuries ago (“The Way to Christ”): “It is because mankind are ashamed of their members and nakedness, that they borrow their clothing from the earthly creatures. For this they would not have done, had they not lost the angelical form and assumed that of a beast. This borrowed clothing, together with the awakened earthliness and subjection to the powers of heat and cold, is a plain and full proof to man that he is not truly at home in this world. For all earthly appetites, cares and fears, together with this false clothing, must perish and be severed from the soul again.”

Boehme goes on to describe how serpentine Satan told Eve “Her eyes shall be opened, that she might taste, prove and know evil and good as he had done”, but did not tell her that “heat and cold would awake in her, and that the property of the outward constellations would have great power over the flesh and over the mind; his only aim was that the angelical image might disappear in her and Adam. For then they would be constrained to live in subjection to the gross earthliness, and the constellations or stars…”

Kabbalists perceive that God is behind the entire testing process, behind the division of night and day, and behind the creation of woman into that shadow. As woman is Isis, hers is the primal power to dispel the darkness which cloaks her, and in which the gentlemen of the east veil her. The fashion for women to willingly be covered, respecting their spiritual heritage, is also a passing show: her power uncloaked is in the home, to her man and their children, to her sisters and to Allah. The veil protects her in the street.

But as a contemporary symbol, it also casts woman into the shadow – she is not seen, nor does she meet a man’s eyes. The contemporary symbol conveys a religious tension and its extreme symptom against the feminine – when the veil anagrams subconsciously, to evil – and she, like the magdalene in all cultures, is stoned.

Who is behind the black veil floating and fluttering along the road? She feels secure, safer and at peace with God. Her way of grace is unthreatened. Inside the flowing black veil is her vitality and her lamp. In the middle ages, when the Christian religious tension was extreme, intelligent women took to the veil to work creatively; they entered convents and took up positions of artistry and management.

Our Isis is veiled by the night and by the sea. She opens her face to the man who trusts her.

the veil – shekinah

Shekinah is the holy place in the temple veil.

The true meaning of jehad is not war. It is to strive to do good for God.

Dion Fortune’s Moon Magic begins (more or less) with a swiftly walking woman in a black cape, whom the man feels compelled to follow. She reminded him:

In folklore, the Sandman was an enigmatic figure, said to bring good sleep and dreams and also nightmares, by placing sand in the eyes. The image symbolises the passage of time to death – a bardo or state of consciousness between the worlds. Mothers would rock the child to sleep: “the sandman will come for you.” The Sandman as gate keeper, walks a path by the waters, encompassing a range of archetypes from Cain and Abel to Eve.

Our Mother Isis rules the realm of sleep, the tides of the moon, the dreaming and renewal.

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

aquariel link

Mysteries of Isis, part 5 – the Cosmic Apple

Posted on June 10, 2015 by janeadamsart

I am fascinated with ambiguities in Adam and Eve, which fall naturally into this series on Isis. As with Mother Isis, our attitudes towards Eve were bent to the standards of difficult times in history.

Isis and Osiris are a version of our primordial parents: they grew together in the womb of God. Who came first – the womb or the seed: the chicken or the egg? Were they punished, as tradition tells, or was theirs a natural Kabbalistic “descent” from the higher worlds, into the “ascending” evolutionary animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms?

Our responses and reactions to the enigma of our original Face, are played out through our relationships and projections onto each other – generation upon generation.

From some earlier writing:
Consciousness, in its gravitational Fall into a world to see, hear, taste, smell and touch – those five senses across the Apple … needs and seeks a creature’s skin in which to dwell. Creation descending into the creature, encounters the evolutionary process ascending to meet its own potential, or genesis. As embryos in gestation, we are ourselves as little fish in the womb. We are the worlds. We look up to the stars.

Fishes, 1988

What I see and feel is experiential, relative to my five worldly senses by deduction and belief. But my perception has not the curve of sub-atomic or galactic Reality. I live an illusion – an illusion I am able to see. The slice cut across the apple is not the whole apple. No: the whole apple is Above and Below the cross-section with five seeds only, that I see.

Everything – all matter and what matters – evolves towards the nature of its own Beginning. The apple of my eye seeks to know her Self as a whole. In the Beginning, all was made and seen to be good, like a phrase or symphony long before it is written or played: the prototype of all that is to be. The cosmic Apple is lodged in all creation from primordial suns to tiny crystal – the cosmic Serpent is our DNA: the ultimate and instantaneous vision of itself. Thus I am in ascent, through the myriad tapestry of my toil, towards the completion of my eternal Beginning. I live and travel inside the skin of innumerable creatures, very few of whom look within the …

Where is my eye in God? I AM … I am that I am – AHIH ASHER AHIH: TAT TWAM ASI. This is yet again a creature’s skin. Some five point creature or star calls itSelf ADM, generic humanity, and opens its arms to the holy Logos – who am I? That consciousness in holy Logos, ascends. It is forming a vessel, a skin or cloak – a veil – of evolution, to receive and welcome That which descends, coming to encounter it from a galactic gnosis opening very far beyond the frame of ADM.

Who, I wonder, ate the apple of That?

In the beginning of itself, there is time no longer.

From Arcanum Four, 2011

The other day, I found on a shelf The Way to Christ by Jacob Boehme. It fell open to page 99: “… It is but One Thing still, only the property of the tincture was divided; the desire of self-love was taken out of Adam and formed into a woman according to his likeness. And thence it is that man now so eagerly desires the matrix of the woman, and the woman desires the limbus of the man – the fire-element, the original of the true soul by which is meant the tincture of fire. These two were one in Adam, and therein consisted the magical begetting.”

Boehme then expounds on sexual guilt and the borrowed bestial form: vanity in Satan’s persuasion. But the above passage is interesting. I do not think that Eve was Adam’s rib, but it suggests (earlier) that Adam’s masturbatory fantasy, or self love (as in the Egyptian and Indian cosmologies) needed a helpmate:

“And then man must be tried, whether he would stand and subsist in his own powers, before the tempter … a tuned instrument of divine joyfulness for the spirit of God to strike upon. This was tried by that tree, and this severe commandment was added, ‘Thou shalt not eat thereof, for on that day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.’

(Adam was excited: what then is “to die”? What should I know?)

“But it being known to God that man would not stand, and that he had already imagined and lusted after good and evil, God said, ‘it is not good for man to be alone, we will make him a helpmeet for him.’ For God saw that Adam could not then generate magically, having entered with his lust into vanity. Moses has written, ‘God caused a deep sleep to fall upon him, and he slept’; seeing man would not continue in the obedience of the divine harmony in the properties, submitting himself to stand still as an instrument of the spirit of God – God suffered him to fall from the divine harmony into a harmony of his own, viz into the awakened properties of evil and good. The spirit of his soul went into these. And there in this sleep he died from the angelical world, and fell under the power of the outward Fiat, and thus bade farewell to the eternal image which was of God’s begetting. Here his angelical form and power fell into a swoon and lay on the ground.”

William Blake – satan watching the caresses of adam and eve

I am reminded of the Lurianic breaking of vessels as the outward Fiat Lux expanded through them. As in the Siva mythology, there is a fall from Timeless – the Un-create – into time, the name and form of creation: the movement of the infinite through the finite: through death the falling fruit, to release the seed. God does not “roll dice”, but opens the widest possibility containing all the aeons: this is the Fruit. God is not a noun, nor even a verb: God IS the galactic Doppler shift in its boundless entirety: the Buddha breath of Tathagata.

In each of us at conception, a galactic core explodes and is born. But we sleep through it, and dream!

Aphrodite Ares Rose

“By the Fiat, God made the woman out of him, out of the matrix of Venus, that property wherein Adam had the begetress in himself; and so out of one body he made two, and divided the properties of the tinctures – the watery and fiery constellations in the element; yet not wholly in substance but in the spirit: the properties of the watery and fiery soul.”

The One – the monad – cannot exist alone, it interacts through the passage of Two to be a Triad. What is a triad? – a circuit of electricity. What really is a triad? the entire progenitive history and issue from the primordial pairing, like rivers from a mountain spring – the fountain returns to itself: Hokhmah Binah Tifareth

Here is a story. The cosmic serpent rustled along the ground in the orchard of Paradise. Eve the woman offered Adam fruit – a cleft seed. Within her moved the ageless knowledge of her sister Lilith, the ocean at night before the breath of JHVH. This passed through Eve into the man, and he rose and went to work in the field.

Face of Eve, 2011

I saw through a glass darkly, that Eve grew from Adam’s rib (apparently) near his heart; but her knowledge was older than he is. She embodied his primordial anima. In her knowledge, she and he are one being, undivided: when she passes the knowledge to him, it separates them. There is a conjugal distancing, a mutual appraising: there are beginnings and endings: the tsim tsum rustles – the big bang.

The position of a particle-wave in the Heisenberg principle, is not its movement. It cannot capture the movement. The gap between position and movement baffles theologians and scientists. The big bang is a primary spark of Netzach, when God created a tsim tsum for God to behold God, hence male and female: a dynamic intercourse.

In Boehme’s writing the primordial Adam fell deeply asleep in Eden: he became passive-receptive for God to work upon, fashion and manifest the Left Pillar of the Tree of Life. He became feminine to God – Yin to the Yang; and thus the emergence of Eve.

Eve’s odyssey, 1989

We are – relative to galactic reality – deeply asleep. Eve opened her eyes from the sleep of Adam and beheld God creating her form. Like Enoch, the woman spoke with God, and she was not: yet she was not absorbed into God, but was returned to Adam as a desirable projection of his inner self. And he saw in her, the matrix, the earth, or source: the serpent power. And she saw in him the limbus, the fiery ignition.

Fire is spark and earth is substance becoming. The watery baptism unites them.

Traditionally, Isis is Lilith, the original bride of Adam, whom Eve supplanted. Isis/Lilith is the Great Sea, the matrix of all being before speech, fiat and birth. In Her, the discarnate man was cradled. He had no other being than Her breath and brooding breast: the Sea was dark: the deep over which the lips of Genesis moved to separate the light from the dark. Fiat Lux!

Even the lips are “two”. For something to happen, a “two” becomes “three” – the happening or Word.

Eve grew out of Adam’s rib to manifest and behold as Woman separately: the dream of Adam. Traditionally, Lilith as Eve’s shadow grew bitter, displaced and jealous. Throughout history the Lilith archetype is that region within the male soul which he demonizes and blames – and so do we as women, blame ourselves.

In the womb, there was no separation: Lilith and Adam were One, as were Osiris and Isis. The primitive primate Adam does not forgive Great Mother for turfing him out of the womb to seek a bride. He knows she is a witch …

A DREAM
A long time ago, I dreamed I was made to go and fight a horse of
hay floating on the ocean.  Here is an extract:
'...With this physical memory, and not caring to look back, 
I reached him again, near the beach. He was still in the sea.  
He had been doing two drawings on pieces of brown cardboard 
now discoloured by the water.

'"Look," he said. The first drawing was a portrait of himself. His
head was tender and childlike, the nose slender and unformed.
He was peaceful and pretty.  This picture of him was held - like
a babe in arms - by the second picture he drew.  Something 
ineffably old, like a carcass or skeleton, lay on a bed, 
disintegrating into a thousand pieces like shattering earthen-
ware.  She laughed her leering head off at herself, and the
drawing of him which she held.  This vessel held him and 
crumbled like a wall. It was horrific.

'The way he'd drawn himself moved me with a strange, complete
pleasure as we stood together in the sea, examining damp bits
of cardboard.  I said to him, "This is how you were when you 
were a little boy, isn't it?"

'What children in the hollow mockery of the witch who labours
around them, wait to be born?  There is no falsehood in the
dear plain face of the child.'

Note Boehme said “a woman, according to his likeness”. This suggests more than a mere human pairing: the woman according to his likeness is within him as Lilith, Great Isis, Binah Ge, the Sea.

God does not create what is not there. God shows the form to Adam, and She arises from near his heart, becoming flesh, becoming lovely. The desire to know in substance the Great Circle of good and evil already pulsed in Adam’s heart, when God lifted the night from day.

Hades carries off Persephone – or Lilith from Eve – into the Underworld. 1957

In the Great Circle is an intuition that Adam’s divine genital desire evolves through Eve and countless human cycles, into the heart centre.

Boehme said Adam lost his angelical power as he fell from the tree through Yetzirah into Assiyah, Earth. The angels and archangels are cosmic conduits: they have only the four upper chakras on the flowering stem, Sun, Venus, Moon and Mercury. Their obedience to galactic Law is seamless: they have no choice. The animals on Earth have the four lower chakras on the root stem – Saturn, Mars, Jupiter and Sun.

Adam’s flute bridged all seven chakras through Sun/heart centre as an instrument: the appearance of free will – the fruit on the ground which perishes and releases seed.

… where the Angel treads: 1988

The consciousness which dreamed in eternal Isis awoke in Adam within the earthly orchards of Eve. It was of a different order. It was no longer angelic – it must plough the ground. It was human, the ultimate healing of the primordial sacred wound which yawns among the stars. Our angelic and animal natures rise and fall through the heart: the rising and the falling are waves of the breathing Sea.

Uniting the animal and angelic natures we slowly discover and reveal as we become human, the primordial embrace of love. It falls open. It is as far from the constraint of conventional romantic fantasy, as the ocean from a puddle. Isis – Binah, Rhea, Ge.

Fool and Lamb on a Hill, 1988

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

aquariel link

Mysteries of Isis, part Four – The House of God

Posted on June 6, 2015 by janeadamsart

Labyrinth and Rose Cross

Part 4 in the “Isis” series. This Meditation on the Virgo constellation and the Gothic art was written in 1992. It is from my book “The Masters’ Eye” – inspired by Louis Charpentier’s “The Mysteries of Chartres Cathedral” (R.I.L.K.O.)

Contact me if you would like a copy of “The Masters’ Eye”. I produce it from home (275 pages) but might be able to turn it into an ebook.

roof, chartres

In the House of God, the Cross represents the IAM (AHAM in sanskrit, AHIEH in hebrew) or AIM of Solomon’s temple. It was laid sky to ground-plan for the Common Era; in the cruciform shape of nave and transepts.

The horizontal beam of the Cross is warp and weft of the great picture of the universe. On this loom is strung the imaging or spectrum of the five senses: our body and terrain of perception.

The vertical beam, soaring limitlessly Above as Below, and effulgent through the sensory fabric, is the essence of our Self. Its spectrum, like Siva’s fiery column, transcends the narrow horizontal band of the senses and their story of space and time. We see higher and lower octaves of the same instrument. (Link to “Cathedral Building“)

Essentially, the horizontal beam manifests time and space. The vertical beam intersects this tapestry at any given point of life, as cognition or awareness, before and after birth and death, and in the depth of dreamless sleep. It is anterior to the ‘evidence’ it illumines. It brings into play our hidden dimension.

The heart of the Cross is a fluid point of stillness wherein the two planes meet. They create upon each other a factor of vital resistance: the birth of an evolutionary consciousness. The vertical beam is masculine, the Creative potential; and the horizontal is feminine, the balancing inertia or momentum: (or rajas, tamas, whose “balance” is sattva.) In the ground-plan of the Cathedral, the vertical is laid along the meridian west to east, Earth’s rotation to sunrise.** The horizontal crosses it, south and north, as do the Pillars of Solomon, to uphold the cosmic temple.

**Sunrise, itself motionless to the rotating surface of Earth, is “outside time”. Sunrise encircles our local measure and engirdles Earth. To the Temple plan, sunrise is the metaphysical centre of gravity, or “sky” unchanging

So we have first the creative principle, the idea upon the ground, a map or sacred diagram laid out along our axis of sunrise. From this arises the actual fabric, like a plant: the Tree of Life’s integrity on the columns of Jakin and Bohaz. The equilibrating of active and passive “poles” of construction, manifests this principle. A draft sketch is translated into an arch, a portal of height, breadth and depth. It manifests for us in three dimensions.

Paradoxically, the visible, audible and tangible, is a worldly cross-section through the numinously unseen. The grace and proportion of the building, altering the consciousness that enters it, is an echo only of the Light which was its inspiration. It is the ripple or projection upon the sensory field, of all time, all space, and simultaneously it is neither.

Nowadays, a hologram is created by projecting laser beams to cross each other at right angles. An image is created in space when the mutual-interference pattern of their rays precisely fits. Upon this principle the perceptible universe is strung, and sustained. The same image-ing of three dimensions, from the galactic to the miniature, will manifest an apparently solid picture of reality, wherever you cut through the projection. You pass your hand through empty air, and yet the picture remains, like a standwave.

The same applies to apparently impregnable infrastructures of our mind, emotions, karmic dragons, and sorrows of life. What are these really? Who holds the lamp which illumines the inner space, like clear sky?

The Cathedral is a projection onto the physical plane, of a “hologrammatic” revelation, achieved by cross-fertilising or marrying that plane with its numinous perpendicular, in sacred geometry.

In twelfth century gothic art – (Fulcanelli’s argot or art-gothique, the slang of the Philosophers’ Stone) – the Knights of the Temple did not depict the Crucifixion. Their true Cross is in the natural ground-plan of heaven to Earth, as drawn with a circle round it by stake and string. This circumscribed cross is also an ancient form of the Hebrew letter TAV, which signifies completion.

The Christ, an ancient, immanent, unfathomable mystery uplifted in stone and earth, is in the Templars’ sanctuaries Un-crucified. The body of nave and transepts lies upon Earth to receive Heaven. This follows the law of mandala and yantra construction, which diagram the laws of tree growth. The holy Spirit so earthed, engages with the commodity of the world. And the gothic Temples to Notre Dame in northern France represent each a star in the Virgin constellation, as laid out over the land.

The real meaning of “the Virgin” is “she who is ripe”.

At the time of harvest she is the fruitful womb, receptacle for implantation, one that is in readiness. The Spirit is seeded deep into matter, into the cave or oracle of Earth – the grain, the bread of life. In an earlier age, Our Lady was Isis of Egypt who reunited the fragments of the body of Osiris into his wholeness or Divinity. She has her counterpart in Hindu cosmology as Parvati, Mother of the universe, Daughter of the Mountain, shakti power of manifestation and abundance. In Greece she was known as Demeter and as Ceres, from whom the grain sprouts.

Her Knights, being Hospitallers or Guardians of the Sanctuary (routes of pilgrimage) enlisted in the early part of the twelfth century Common Era, the support of the Church, whom they funded. They made an offer which could not be refused, to build Houses of God. Their spiritual sponsor was the great Benedictine Bernard of Clairvaux.

But these Knights were not mere Crusaders. They were messengers of Great Mikael, archangelic slayer of Dragons clerical as well as secular: who, looking deep into the dark dense coil of Baphomet, liberates and raises up the Light – as consciousness. A hundred years or so later, the Church, frightened of their rival power, accused them of devil worship and burnt them at the stake.

Here, time as a Great Circle clashed with linear or ‘tick tock’ time. By then the Knights had seeded a number of soaring Temples of Light into the soil of Mother Earth in northern France; and more were undoubtedly planned to fill and peg down the entire constellation; the vessel for the Divine Child. The Black Death followed their demise as an Order, fragmenting time, space and continuity. The Black Death flowed around the gothic sanctuaries which transcended it.

“Gothic” is a strange word, as handed down to us, for it has acquired paradoxical resonances of horror, caricature and over-elaboration – I believe this is due to the plague’s shocking spectre in our deep cellular and racial memory.

The Order reappeared several generations later as a Rosy Cross fraternity, and from about the seventeenth century onward, was reorganised into the Degrees of freemasonry.

From the fertile soil or compost of the Black Death, had sprouted a strange Renaissance flower – Botticelli’s Aphrodite – and the later cultivation of a deductive science to investigate and ravish her.

Hokhmah and Nezach on the Tree
I find a resonance or echo here with the birth of Aphrodite in greek mythology, from the castration of Uranus the god of Revelation. In those legendary dreams, Uranus, the Sky of Stars, lay with Gaea, Earth. Gaea grew tired of the incessant titans Uranus begot on her, and called on their young son Chronos – meaning cycles of Time and therefore limitation – to do the job. The procreative organ of Uranus fell into the sea. It stirred up a titanic froth on the wave, from which emerged the comely figure of Aphrodite, goddess of Desire, pulse of nature’s beauty, and of attraction.

In the geographical solar system, the polar tilt of both Venus and Uranus inclines at a virtual right-angle to that of the other planetary bodies. Mercury, Terra, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Pluto all rotate more or less, west/east. The rotational spin of Venus and Uranus is north/south, almost into the plane of their orbits.

That innocence, inner science, or in-formed awareness of their association is shown in the ancient myths, whose Masters possessed no measure more than their ear to the ground.

From “Mysteries of Chartres Cathedral” by Louis Charpentier:
“The currents in old Earth are numerous and various, but here at Chartres we are concerned with one that is especially sacred, capable of awakening a man to the spiritual life. The DIVINE is born here, and no material influence may be allowed to trouble or destroy it. The Hill of Chartres must not be polluted. That is why, among all the french Cathedrals, Chartres is the only one in which no king, cardinal or bishop is interred. The Hill must remain virgin.”

This paragraph declares the Resurrection of the Christ. Here there is no merely dead seed. The telluric pulse at Chartres is particularly potent. Here under the Mound in ages past, was enthroned a Black Virgin, Our-Lady-under-the-Earth, as a focus for pilgrimage and inner purification. She is our subconscious, so she is the ageless Isis, Demeter, Belisima.

Scorpio & Virgo glyphs: phallus and womb

The currents in old earth – like the mesh of chorionic villi, those tiny vessels and fibres of lifeblood which embed the embryo in the lining of the maternal womb – are the same subtle meridians of the Dragon or Serpent energy which flow along the leylines. In the landscape, as in our body, these are gathered and released or contained at acupunctural power-points – (see in Charpentier’s work, and below, the map of Virgo Our Lady of the Constellation in France) – to invoke Archangel Mikael’s protection, and for gestation.

These ageless foci of authority or power, are condensers. They are dolmens or druidic circles of stones. They became towers, temples and churches to Michael and Maria, the Guardian and the Mother of God. The Michael and Mary leyline in England runs from the eastern part of the country through Ogbourne St George in Wiltshire through Avebury and Stonehenge, Glastonbury and a succession of tumps, mounds and chapels across Sedgemoor, Devon and Cornwall to St Michael’s Mount in the bay of Penzance. A friend I visited in Ogbourne, where George slew the dragon of Albion, has a well inside her house sunk deep into this Line. Her guests have interesting dreams at night.

To “slay” or pierce the Dragon, harnesses its creative strength. It can be tamed and trained to become a strong and willing servant or alliance to the higher power. This corresponds to the Karmic “leyline” of tendency (ascending and descending Lunar nodes, known as the Head and Tail of the dragon) in our astrological maps. Where the Moon’s orbit around the Earth crosses the path of Earth’s orbit around the Sun, these are the Lunar nodes.

The Knight is the seer., The Dragon is his personal attachment to the mortal coil to master. The Dragon, as electric current in the copper wire, is coiled around a MAGNET, the treasure of the Source, our inner elixir.

1992

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

aquariel link

Mysteries of Isis – The Squid and the Lighthouse

Posted on June 3, 2015 by janeadamsart

Child mother Isis, 2003

Part Three of my meditations with Isis of the ancient world.

The Squid & Lighthouse! Rather a fine name for a pub? Lighthouses, helping the ships at sea, and sweeping their beam through field, tide and rocky cliffs at night, fascinate small children. These two early drawings of Isis at the seaside in Cornwall show also the sun’s path of light :

I am trawling Dion Fortune’s Sea Priestess and Moon Magic, developing fresh insights as they arise, and some of my own source writings.

Today I ask – how to confront the Shadow? Bathing at present in Her name – allowing all my paths to lead back to Isis – I am aware that Her worship in the ancient world branched into some dark cults. There are whispers of human sacrifice and corruption, priestly megalomania, sexual power-games and the cold, oceanic indifference of Herself to the human drama. In many ways she came to represent the shadow-feminine archetype which men fear and therefore persecute – La Belle Dame Sans Merci. Interwoven with Lilith, the shadow bride of Adam, Isis in our collective underworld is dark and thirsts for flesh.

Here is a link to the subconscious and psychological impact of the Lilith Archetype.

Travelling to the Moon’s dark side, I shall hitch a ride today, on some earlier visualisations, or path-workings. They arise spontaneously in my journal. In my experience, the way to get to grips with Shadow, is to invoke a higher frequency, or conscious vibration. This is the lamp which, penetrating the shell like a neutrino, reveals the shadow’s original face, which is light.

Yod and magic portals – bring Isis to earth – 2002

A friend came yesterday to tell me about Paul Levy’s book “Dispelling Wetiko the curse of evil” – and I just made a typo: as evil is live spelled backwards, for “curse” I wrote “cures”. Similarly the anagram for “sacred” is “scared”…

The Squid Economy – “Kochtopus“. Is this what I am … ?

Ursa Major, 1988 … Or am I this?

Children are abused in the satanic mill: extreme religionists indoctrinate and turn young inexperienced souls and orphans of war into bombs and toxic weapons. Our racial affliction is plain to see in the global “Squid economy” – in media degradation and the gaming culture, in the catastrophic greed of rain-forest destruction, in pollution, human rights violation and abuse of all kinds. Many of us feel overwhelmed, and wear despairing makeovers, yet in a sense – innocence? – the herd remains vitally, sweetly human in the dirty water.

There are more unselfish activists than at any other period in history. They work as antibodies in the zones of war and viral disease. More souls are embodied – young and old, traumatised and serene – during our present era than ever before. The Great War in the twentieth century mowed a huge crop, who are now reborn and damaged. In other periods of history, there was a different ratio of those incarnate to those in astral latency. It is as if the polar hourglass nowadays allows the whole of history to descend and materialise; for our world is changing. Some things which are as they always were, are no longer hidden. The realities are forced into our everyday consciousness.

In my view, metaphysical evil has no separate cause. From the root of all Being, there grew an illusory forgetting: and the forgetfulness develops a kingdom whose subjects repeat, “Be thou my good”; whose influence grips and fascinates our unconscious. However, few can speak with authority on this topic unless they survived the concentration camps.

I feel the upsurge of visible evil is temporary in our evolutionary humanquake. With Pluto in Capricorn (2008 -2024), It all comes out, it emerges onto the surface by the force – the magma – of the Light dug under it. Call a spade a spade!

Get your welly-boots on – go for it! 1988

Each of us is trying to cope with some degree of outrage, through the variety of our Karmic lenses. It may afflict us physically, psychologically, spiritually, environmentally and through the world-channel. Keep the lighthouse beam steady, and keep the crystal candle-power rotating through the storm-tossed night.

priest and oak

I knew an old Dominican priest, Father Alan Cheales. He was a lighthouse-keeper. He used to say, the hands of the clock stand at near midnight, but no amount of darkness can extinguish a candle when lit. Locally I watched over the years, a friend’s resurrection from suicidal alcoholic. The Squid didn’t get him, because the steady sweeping of the lighthouse beam through his coastline illumined the power and faith of his inner continent.

I completed some years ago, my magnum-opus, The Masters’ Eye, which invokes an open place of meeting. Using the book (at long last !!) as an oracle, it opened at page 109, “The House of God”– a transept or interior temple, intersecting vertical and horizontal beams.

Star of David, Cross of Yeshua, Crescent of Islam

It is also the Qabalistic Cross – masculine and feminine. (I will post those pages later, in the Isis series). The focus is on interior temple building, along the ground-plan of sacred geometry. There is a visualisation – a Gothic arch or hyacinth head rises through the draft sketch or design of vesica pisces: the Tree of Life, a living Yantra lingum. It tumbles me into the font of the blessed. It rings like a bell note. It does not advise on life chimera, but it informs and transforms them vitally from within. I trust the sacrament is carried into life along my veins, as along the arms of a tree by osmosis. This was always my aim, and continues so.

“The grace and proportion of the building, altering the consciousness that enters it, is an echo only of the Light which was its inspiration. It is the ripple or projection upon the sensory field, of all time, all space, and simultaneously it is neither. Nowadays a hologram is created by projecting laser beams to cross each other at right angles. An image is created in space when the mutual interference-pattern of their rays precisely fits.”

The Master’s Eye, 2009

Enter the Body of Light. The principle is simple – I open a book, it is flat, but the designs on the pages are cut so they stand up when the book opens, and I enter Notre Dame of Isis at Chartres. I feel at once when I enter the dimension of the inner Temple, and am awakened into the height, depth and breadth. No ready solution comes for my surface dilemmas, but none are needed; they are in God’s hands.

maps of Virgo constellation, stellar and on earth

I am deep in the underground circular Cavern of Isis, the heartbeat of love. I studied some inner pathworkings with the Pharos school twelve years ago; they are found in a flash – a long rock passage from behind the altar’s veil led to this sub-terranean chamber; a green snake mosaic spirals three times around the floor’s circumference. Be seated here with other celebrants, to pray with peace, to stand against abuse, to illumine the obscurity.

Table round, companions of light, 2002

The chamber is octagonal. The rock walls are plain but pregnant. The presence of naked Black Isis is massive and elemental in the rock. In her lap, I bathe with my astral lover in Yesod. The male-female filament is spun, whose Light ascends as gossamer to the Lamp. It is the “pith practice”. Keep invoking this dimension with the tidal fountain breath. As the physical pattern becomes more deeply in-formed: the soul’s hologram alters.

I have Tarot Key 12 in my inner eye as well – the Well, through which my surrender to truth exquisitely occurs. The Hanging Man is believed by many, to portend a great evil. In fact it pictures a “reversal” or return – a completion in the alchemical Great Work. Essentially we are born head first into earth, and tread the skies.

Dion Fortune’s “Moon Magic” awakens my muse. The petals in my brittle life are prosaic, but from far behind them in the continental hinterland, come the prompts and procedure of the Rose – the integrative awakenings, the ripple, the pulse of Isis.

I saw in the paper, the army in the ME is named as isil – not isis. What do these letters stand for? Here is a link which discusses the abbreviations and their semantics – ignoring of course, the human collective dimension in the western world, which is Isis. When hatred is injected into “Isis” from whatever viewpoint, we should realise that the feminine as a whole is targeted – as those medieval organisations and inquisitions set out to do – and we should watch whereof we speak. What is?

Read the word-sounds – how “Isil” and “evil” terminate Isis and Eve.

I believe that more effective nowadays than group ritual, is to illumine the seed-tendencies within myself, to cease colluding with them unconsciously.

However, in 2001 or 2002, a group of senior light-workers went into “a region where the eye of evil weeps blood” on the astral plane. They stabbed its heart to turn it round and restore Kether. Within three weeks of this overdue intervention, German scientists invented a cyberspace technique which can target any website in the world that hosts neo-Nazi symbols. This was not conclusive – it must be repeated, at whichever level we recognise our slave mentality and take responsibility for it. With the will to freedom, a way is found, whether with others or in solitude. In my view, we are never alone: we witness the death throes of the venom’s lashing tail. It is a paradoxical privilege to endure it for our generations, as millenia of collective Karmic atrocities work their way through the Shadow into the light, and are dismantled.

To dispel the dark, we find and illumine our way – we learn to detach from our own drama into compassion for the bigger picture. To turn it around: “Let obscurity fly from thee …”

dim and sainted window, alchemical stained glass in Chartres

Some of the thoughts in this post awoke through reading Paul Levy’s recent article “The Kabbalah’s Remarkable Idea” (www.awakeninthedream.com), I recommend it for an exceptionally clear exposition on the paradox of good with the evil impulse. He is the author of “Dispelling Wetiko – Breaking the Curse of Evil” and “The Madness of George W Bush – a Reflection of our Collective Psychosis“.

According to Paul Levy, the practice of “Tikkun” in Kabbalah “transforms the impulse within ourselves in the individual recognition that the world is and always has been a pure spiritual reality. The inner and outer worlds, like a dream, are seen to be reflections of each other.” He makes the essential point that the evil impulse is a charade, with an outstanding capacity to obscure what is Real. Deep inside the broken shells – the Qelipoth – is the spark of God to redeem. The evil impulse tests and develops our sinew of Light through “grace under pressure”. There is always some issue to value and wrestle with, in our lives.

Our world as a whole, struggles in a Qelipoth shell which paradoxically empowers the great bodhisattvas. It tests the psychological muscle of Sun and Moon – our ancient and eternal Osiris and Isis. According to the 16th century Lurianic vision, the nature of evil arises from a shattering of the vessels by the tsim-tsum radiation – what we call the big bang. The big bang is not a historical event: it is timeless, through all time – it is NOW. Our broken subjectivities suffer an ontological “separateness” and a longing to return. From this derive our competitive compulsions of alienation – disordered movements of the centrifugal force through centripetal formation.

Embracing all this, God timelessly beholds God, creating a spatial interval for time and space to be. God beholding God in every hologram of the mineral, plant, animal and human soul, inspires an “apart” which yearns for union: the asymmetry of our biosphere and of seeds of love, in the primordial wound. In the Lurianic vision, we co-create with God, beholding God by trying to heal what we are: the opening seed. This too shall pass: this too is God.

Luria lived in Poland and died at forty: his descendants, the rabbis of joy, practice tikkun – they co-create with God. They dance and pray and carry the flame.

Chabad at prayer

The disordered expression of centrifugal force through centripetal formation, as seen in the fragmenting islands and ambitions of our world today, has at its living core the unbroken tidal breath of Hokhmah, Binah on the Tree – our Father and Mother whose Child is born to converge the living Triad of the Spirit: Tifareth. Hokhmah is Wisdom. Binah is Understanding. Tifareth is Beauty; the heart conscience brings the primordial parents together. With this ring I thee wed. With my body I bless thee. With our child the fruit is given.

My way in the obscuration, is to scribe through Daat, whatever transfigures the feelings and thoughts of the night which arise each morning – my lighthouse beam.

In Daat, the Sefira of “unknown cognition”, an open book rests on an eagle’s wings. I can’t see or read a single word in it, for they are of Light, JHVH. Beriah the World of Creation does not explain. Beriah is the revelation. The servant writes. A monastic scribe patiently illumines a script of the lightning flash as it flickers over sea cliffs in the night: Scripto-Tetragrammaton. Awakening my interior contact with these strata, is my preparation and my prayer.

Orpheus – November 1987

salamanders

In the centre of the Floor of Isis is a source of light – very strong light, like a magnesium flare. What are the salamanders? They are the deva spirits of the fire. Their elemental counterparts are gnomes, undines and sylphs-of-prana. Their appearance in the flicker-flame is serpentine and lizard-like. Receive the warmth and brilliance of this light. With the Companions seated in the octagonal cave – or is it hexagonal? – our individual third-eye beams are directed into the centre lamp of Isis. Our concerted focus “delivers from evil”. To see the phenomenon, is to dismantle it. Turn it around, and live! – as Dante did when he put Lucifer into reverse, and flew out through purgatorio into the white rose of paradise.

Our unconscious and disordered impulses cluster to each side of the Tree, to suck the polarity excess or imbalance. They crave the Tree’s conscious heart, of which they are deprived: the Qelipoth have no centre. They are adept persuaders with our spiritual belief systems, market forces and political tyrannies. They are subtle gourmets for the threshold of awakening – they savour the souls who are honeyed there, or who are “star pupils” and strive for leadership. Their weapon of enticement is glamour. They hunger for something which no longer concerns an evolved spirituality.

Protection from the Squid economy evolves through a lack of personal ambition, lack of desire for glamour. Then the Squid – for all its intellectual power and persuasion – can find nothing to get hold of, nothing to inhabit it. It is better to see the cobra in the room than to trip over it in fantasy. Use the plain nuts and bolts of psychology! “You must throw yourself in.” No guru can spoon it to you.

“Then the old man of the Earth stooped over the floor of the cave, raised a huge stone from it and left it leaning. It disclosed a great hole.

“‘That is the way,’ he said.
“‘But there are no stairs!’
“‘You must throw yourself in. There is no other way.'”

George Macdonald, The Golden Key

There is the story of supping with Satan. All the spoons were too long to self-feed the delicious feast, and everyone starved. At last they learned to turn the spoons to feed one another – for Lucifer taught them the lesson of life.

Lucifer – Satan – was and is the Bearer of Light. We are dark outside, but comely within.

Unfortunately I lost the website for the photos take in Chartres, above.

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

aquariel link

Mysteries of Mother Isis – Birth of Venus

Posted on May 31, 2015 by janeadamsart

Shepherdess

The second in a series of explorations – ad lib – towards the Isis archetype.
I often wake up wondering – what should I say or tell you: what should I ask or risk, what is my responsibility? HONESTY – which is proper?

Actually, I don’t know. My belief is not the “right” one and I cannot be honest enough to cover all contingency. Let go, listen and keep silent. How to turn the event which Divine Providence holds? When the truth is ripe and ready to be said, speech drops into the right order – ignoring my hope and rehearsal. Let it go.

Alchemy - Heleen's story of the little crow and the eagle

Alchemy – Heleen’s story of the tired crow and the eagle’s strength and the holy city: “How do I know what I see is true?” “Start from the premise AS IF everything you see is true, instead of your usual assumption that it is not.” With un-effort, grace, the fountain upward river flows down the mountain – crow flies, crow sees.

My daily journal is a prelude or preamble to life as lived. When I’m out there talking to life, I cannot copy my prelude with my tongue and throat. Writing is a diving board into the heart. Talking is the swim. My everyday relationships swim, and try not to hit the rocks which the diver sees clearly from above. That is why I get anxious – the surface tension.

This is important to realise, because it is a PATTERN. The patter of my little feet is a pattern, a self maintenance.

Bunny hide and seek with the higher Self

Communion is relationship. Writing is a communion of active and receptive poles in my inner dialogue, a warm electro-magnetic circuit: a secret inner lover. Being in the world, I face persons’ rugged rocks and unknown territory, with my unknown territory, and often shrink. When I meet Dr Livingstone “stepping out of the jungle gloom” (Moody Blues, 1970s), such moments are glorious. But mostly it is interestingly difficult to part my waves of bamboo and chattering monkeys. Progress is slow.

I grasped a lifelong patter clearly this morning – where is it? I was reflecting how important all my creative work is to me. I am sure it must be preserved and transmitted “to help others” – the landscape of my er – enlightenment.

But – it occurs to me – what gives my light priority over your lighthouse?

The lighthouse is shorthand. Not only a man’s little lighthouse; it is each soul’s private inner world of which they are the lookout and keeper of the lamp: our allocated portion of the Infinite. Regardless of life’s puddles of hard set mud, each individual is a universe, a watery surface tension bonded and in communion with every single other in the deep. Regardless of the general gangster mentality we suffer in the street, we are the Temple. We are the human Template.

Thou art: I am.

J.Krishnamurti at Brockwood, 1974

Such thoughts, incessantly regurgitated and delivered through my journal, are I believe, a transmission. Each time this realisation comes, it is fresh. As I learned with Krishnamurti, the inner human has no set mould. It overcomes conflict, every moment. It shatters the tower with the moving wave, the unbroken circle of the tide in and out. Each time K spoke, he sat on his hands and searched his way through the conflict, for the first time. We are not set like jelly. We are living, asymmetric transmitters of the discovery – “out of the jungle gloom”.

Why do I have these urges – to transmit? I feel like a cormorant storing fish in my throat to feed my young. It was always an urgency, since I was very small. OK, it is the artist’s creative urgency, or it is the magid in the higher, deeper world behind my spine. I am trying to break free of my walls, or soften them.

Emily

This new pastel drawing of Emily is rather china-doll: my reaction is to think what her cher ami would say (who requires photographic likenesses), and to be judgmental; but my liberation is to view an appearance along the way, a supple way shedding skins like a river-snake. Drawings are expressions coming through, and this one slightly romanticised, makes her younger, her hair is not right, but her eyes are strong.

When I began it here at home, I danced as in the old days, the energy of creation with my leonine Liszt on the gramophone. I went to see Emily yesterday, and tried to remember to give her room. We discussed Jonathan Dimbleby’s biography of Prince Charles, and the current human lemming tendency with the deep. Stop butting in. Why do I think I am right, why do I think I must say something? Why not hear and learn, why not give her space and freedom to search and be herself?

We also discussed how unpleasant it is to have her carers put on her makeup and mess her hair, their blind fingers … I mentioned my grandmother’s tiny touches and fragrances of rouge in little jars, and how she removed more than she put on, leaving the essence. Emily is pleased about her new red frock and laughed when I called her a scarlet woman, but she hasn’t tried it on yet. She mentioned she got into trouble at the weekend, for complaining about her Sunday lunch. I said I got rather a mouthful as well.

THE PATTERN – I saw this clearly through all my life, and I stand at a threshold to be delivered from it – I stand in the doorway. What is it?

The key to the door of dreams – use it (1987)

Stepping back, I saw my, her, their, your … limited – blinkered – view we have of each others’ commodious priority and stress. I saw how we enclose and judge and distort it – like the church did in history, and the militant extremists do now. I start to give up my notions and that is a relief. I wrote the other day in my journal about Botticelli getting influenced by Savonarola in his later work. I saw this superficially. Now I see what it must feel like – the truth – to have these tight, flowing demons surface through my art and speech, inspiring fear, commanding obedience. He is being true to his inner anxiety, and Savonarola is the cloak.

I wonder if I was Botticelli. I can be whomever I like.

sketch sandro botticelli

Everything I say about transmission through Daat and the benefit of my enlightenment and labour to humanity, is conditioned by my personalised obsession to live, to survive, to be justified (Yesod). It is an idea I espouse, to embody my meanings, and to justify the time I spend in my temple of Isis, writing and working things out.

This is not intellectual. When I write and the continents start to join, very deep feelings of unconditional love are stirred. Love has its own law: the law of cosmic love, the soul law. It is a FEELING. I love to describe it, but the feeling is more real than any verbal poetry. Verbal poetry caresses the feeling, and slides away off it, like seawater off a whale, or pilot fish around a shark: the foam marbles the wave. The FEELING has no social code, for it is of the deep, regenerative ocean. The feeling is Aphrodite-Isis – Botticelli’s birth of Venus coming in to land – the land rushes to cover her nakedness with a flowery cloak. Good heavens!

And why not draw/copy those wonderful figures who flank Her? She came in with the tide, on a shell, on the froth of the sea – the froth of Uranus’ dismembering, releasing sperm. She is the linga of Uranus.

I am moved by this archetype whenever I tune into painting or drawing in a special way with music. I feel her nakedness like a whale, and am discharged like lightning.

It is the Kabbalistic lightning flash to earth.

This is not where I planned to go this morning. I tapped the membrane, and this is truth. In the Greek mythology, Chronos – Saturn as Time – cut off the creative organ of his father Uranus, and it fell into the sea and all the blood turned into white foam; and tritons bore the naked form of Aphrodite and her copper tresses to the beach on an oyster shell. Male sexual arousal is transposed into the feeling in the tip which receives and is feminine. My birth chart has Venus opposite Uranus – in Seal of Solomon’s resonance.

Where I planned to go, is why these images are important to me and fill me with life’s certainty and wonder: my obsession with them. They are tremendously clear to me, but my language with them is not easy for others to engage with. Be thankful I have the liberty to exercise this language at home; and to offer it back to the gods.

I think I wanted to say, that all my life I am convinced (whenever the archetype surfaces) that it is RIGHT: yet it doesn’t fit into social or moral code. I keep it cloaked – but is it right, relative to others’ sense of rightness? I can grope towards spilling beyond boundaries in a self-realised, ontological way – inner freedom – but navigating it with others who are also right, is the Karmic setup. We all are right. We all have this feeling.

I want to “help others” but the attention to my inner housework is stronger. The artist’s necessity is stronger. The whale moves on !

Gaia covers Aphrodite with earth and flowers. Wild, wonderful and startling is the pagan flow of the birth of Venus! How difficult it is to “copy” the genius of Botticelli’s anatomical and gestural distortions. My Isis begins to stir and to awake.

The patter of my little feet is a pattern, a spin, a self maintenance. I pasted this sentence again from earlier, for it was about to deliver. Where was it leading me? Accusations of selfishness … relationships are vulnerable, and make others vulnerable. Is this the way in which – through private relationships within the clan – sexuality became a hidden, sacred space? The sacrament is kept, to guard against invasion and injury. Writing music with it, we sought “the Isis tone”.

This theme runs through Dion Fortune’s “Moon Magic“: priests and priestesses serving Isis, encountered the living Mystery in the cave beyond the village, where the lamp is kept. They found they wronged themselves and Isis if they did not honour and explore the feeling. It didn’t fit with anything the clan does, so they kept the secret. There were terrible penalties for relationships beyond the pale. Yet these relationships nourished the life force of the clan. They became a shrine, engendering respect and sensitivity. This is an opinion; but it is more than an opinion. It acts through visualising. An evolutionary “tantra” touched the hologramic wave-pattern of human existence. If we were bearers, we would try to handle it with respect and delicacy, so it doesn’t just splash around in itself. Nature rises as a passing need in a little lighthouse, and delivers to a woman a white letter, and passes on; and as the woman reads it, she smiles inside.

This opens another image – my open book in Daat in the Tower of alchemy; and how its pages shine without a single word.

Alchemy – the eagle book in Daat

My writing awakes the Fountain’s pithy clarity and creed from within, and it comes all the way up the centre stem of the Tree like sap and fountains to the fertile orchards around. It is again the Uranian linga.

The wedding of parvati and siva, presided by brahma

How gentle this Kundalini is! Kundalini is the life force. This is in my belief system and my code. Look always at what is meaningful, alive and loving. Yogic methods are shed, they were useful but become irrelevant (as Parker Stafford said) when the Feeling is alive and vibrant. It needs no fireworks – it rises and falls like a barometer. The Alchemical Child has no words to say or read, but was and is written down through a complex maternal capillary of images and fire-screens.

At this point, mind stops in the summit of the mountain: wonder. “Above us there was nothing!” And I feel the white pith channel all the way down into the ground, the lotus stem and muddy roots. I am still. Butterflies surround me, but I am in the core of the world: mans’ seed in woman’s cave. Be still and know I am.

Even this is a belief: for beliefs when strongly held, feel good and secure. Advaita teachings recommend to discard each vessel up the mountain of Enquiry into consciousness. The paradox is, that as each vessel rolls away, another and more vibrant one forms from the deep … to spill and spell the Same Thing … the infinite adaptability of the One Thing.

Then the way is not to cling to any of them, but espouse the lovers’ space through which they rise: the sport of the Self. Ascend Annapurna.

Annapurna, 1950

I think the light through the clouds I am getting is that we all act strangely with each other, and tend to make snap judgements when we observe this. We say, that is wrong or right or peculiar, because we have tunnel vision – we see a fragment or an edge through the keyhole, and interpret it in ourselves or others – so as to affirm our own ground.

Whereas, persons are usually in a long term private dilemma, something valuable to which they apply heart and soul. This is the terrain I do not know about, and peer through my tinted spectacle frames – as we all do.

The way here, is to contemplate the situation without opinion, as if it were an extraordinary portrait in a gallery – engaging with her story – and fling wide the door.

Reality isn’t a raincloud over her, but sun rays and a tree; she is running somewhere between her boyfriend and a buddha in the morning. Keep it open.